01/04/2026
A new exhibition at Gold Hill Museum is shedding light on the lives of Shaftesbury area residents who left Dorset for Australia in the mid-Victorian period in search of steadier work, better pay and a more secure future.
The display focuses first on Jobe Tompkins, whose family lived at Brick Hill, now Church Hill, in Enmore Green, when the area was still part of Motcombe Parish. Rather than telling the story in broad terms, the exhibition follows his family through census records, family details and the paperwork that led to their departure.
What makes the display compelling is the way it shows the process step by step. Papers in the case trace the family’s application from the first request for forms in March 1853 through approval, payment for the passage and the regulations issued before they left. Although the exhibition says the process took only two months, the sequence of documents gives a strong sense of how formal and uncertain it must have felt.
One detail stands out. Jobe’s application was first rejected because his daughters were under eight and because children had recently died on voyages to Australia. That small piece of information brings home just how risky the journey could be. The application was later accepted.
The exhibition keeps drawing the story back to places local visitors will know. Jobe is linked to Enmore Green and St James. His second wife, Elizabeth Burt, came from Semley. Those details help root a huge life change in familiar ground.
The voyage itself is brought to life, too. The family left Southampton on the 10th of July 1853 and arrived in Port Jackson on the 12th of October after three months at sea. During the crossing, a baby, George, was born just two weeks before the family landed.
Visitors can also learn more about the Ellenborough, the vessel that carried emigrants to Australia. The exhibition says it was a tine-built wooden ship and later served as a floating isolation hospital in Southampton. An image of emigrants aboard ship helps visitors imagine what that long passage may have felt like.
The exhibition also steps back and explains the wider reasons behind assisted emigration. One panel says Australia needed labourers to help build towns and roads at a time when poverty in England was rising. That means the display is not only about one family but about the forces that pushed and pulled people from this part of Dorset to the other side of the world.
Its strength lies in the records themselves. A census entry, a letter, a rejection and an approval build a picture slowly and powerfully. The exhibition does not stop with the Tompkins family either. It also points visitors towards the stories of William Sims, Elizabeth Lemon and the Upjohn family, widening the picture of 19th century emigration from the Shaftesbury area.
The temporary exhibition upstairs at Shaftesbury’s Gold Hill Museum, The Tompkins Family Emigration Papers, is on display until the end of June.
